— Alexander “Sandy” Vershbow, the deputy secretary-general of NATO. He was speaking to reporters Wednesday about troublesome shortfalls identified following the alliance’s war against Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi last year.

Battleland, long familiar with the Pentagon’s love of things labeled “lessons learned,” was intrigued. It’s neat to think of some entity, somewhere, that concedes there are problems that defy easy solutions.

So we asked Vershbow, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs at the Pentagon from 2009 to February 2012, to detail for us some particularly vexing issues that remain in the “lessons identified” folder.

“I haven’t internalized all these reports, and its probably not yet ready for public consumption even if I could list you a few examples, so I’m going to duck that question,” Vershbow said, diplomatically.

Then he unleashed a roster of lessons identified, but apparently not yet learned, that seemed to go on and on:

I’ve mentioned the more obvious ones: ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance], [aerial] tankers, I think there were other clear gaps in terms of training of personnel — to be able to be thrown into the [NATO’s Italian] headquarters in Naples or at Sigonella.

It’s capabilities, but some of it’s the hardware, some of it is what you can call software – the training, the interoperability – which puts a premium on retooling our exercises over the next few years to address some of the weaknesses that were evident in the Libya operation.

There may be some systems issues relating to computer networks, and the ability to share information across the 28-nation alliance, because each nation contributes information that has its own restrictions, and somehow getting the operators what they need in a fast-moving battlefield environment is not easy, even with the investments to date.

NATO has a pretty sophisticated command and control system, but as we saw when it comes to intelligence-sharing that there are still some firewalls within the alliance that need to be overcome. We took a couple of years to do this in Afghanistan – we have a thing called the Afghan Mission Network – but there was a sense we had to re-invent the wheel when it came to Libya.

Whew. That’s quite a laundry list. Wonder if this means the Center for Army Lessons Learned should change its name?